Turing pattern engineering enables kinetically ultrastable yet ductile metallic glasses

Abstract Enhancing the kinetic stability of glasses typically requires deepening their thermodynamic stability, which increases structural rigidity and degrades ductility; decoupling these properties remains a major challenge. Here, we demonstrate that spatial patterning in metallic glasses produces exceptional kinetic ultrastability that coexists with a thermodynamically metastable, high-energy state and excellent plasticity. Guided by atomistic simulations using replica exchange molecular dynamics and machine learning interatomic potentials, we reveal that oxygen, through reaction–diffusion-coupled pattern dynamics, self-organizes into oxygen-centered pinned structures (OPSs) that serve as localized kinetic constraints. These motifs drastically slow structural relaxation, delivering kinetic stability comparable to ultrastable glasses even as the system retains the high inherent energy of rapidly quenched states. The OPSs’ topology yields a spatially uniform activation of plastic events, promoting strain delocalization under mechanical load. By geometrically tailoring oxygen patterns, we increase the glass transition onset temperature ( T onset ) by about 200 K with negligible loss of deformability. Our findings establish a practicable paradigm for decoupling kinetic and thermodynamic stability and point to a scalable, additive route for designing amorphous materials that combine hyperstability with plasticity.